I have no doubt that each of you reading this will have a long and lucrative sales career.

At one point or another, you will be faced with the problem of selling to a difficult market.

Who you sell to is one of the biggest determining factors of your success.

The thing worth noting: you can change the market you sell to.

An example.

When I started selling software, it was for a company who sold Fuji Xerox photocopiers.

They had been doing it for decades.

And when I say they made big money, it was ridiculous.

6 figure monthly commissions in the late 80's and all through the 90's.

But all of that changed.

Competitors caught up.

Profits dropped.

So they decided to finally listen to the analysts they kept in a room with no windows at the back of the building.

They had built some document management software.

The photocopier guys agreed to start packaging it.

Except, they were selling to government schools who legally had to get 3 quotes for everything.

Tiny margins.

Also very little impact on the end user.

They had to legally keep paper documents on site anyway, so it's just a bit easier in retrieval.

I didn't want to slave away at that.

So I targeted a market with more at stake.

Medical centres.

They were the epitome of "we do what we do because it's what we've always done."

They still used faxes for all correspondence.

They had a minimum of 1-2 full-time staff who were scanning documents.

I had one clinic who had 8 full-time staff on this task.

This meant:

• Repetitive stress injuries
• Office space
• Staff turnover as they hated it
• Wages

There were precedents of documents getting missed and patients dying because of it.

• Clinics being sued
• Doctors duty of care to patients
• Practice managers constantly stressed

And then there was the waste.

• Thousands of pieces of paper per day
• Huge printer bills

When I sold to schools, I would maybe get $5-10k profit per sale.

When I sold to medical centres I would get 6-figure profits, and in their eyes they were getting a bargain.

Exact same solution.

The solution that had a cost of goods to me of... $216.00.

That was the total cost.

$216.00.

The takeaway here - who you choose to sell to will determine how easy your sales career is.

Always pick a market with bigger problems and more money to spend on solving them.